Not fearing to be liked: the majoritarianism of contemporary protest culture

While the anti-globalisation movement and before it
the new social movements tended to cast themselves as minorities, the wave of
Occupy or “take the square” movements have made a crucial point of wanting to
be the majority of the people, as most evidently manifested in Occupiers’ claim
to being the 99%.

“Less than 48 hours.. and we are already 500!!!”. “Less than four days in
and we are already 1,000. Let's keep growing”. “We are reaching 10,000 people!”
These status updates celebrating the increasing number of 'likes' day after
day, were posted on the Facebook page of Democracia Real Ya (DRY), the group
that had a pivotal role in initiating the mobilisation for the May 15, 2011
'indignados' protests in Spain.

With their
emphasis on the rapidly increasing number of ‘fans’ on the group’s Facebook
page, these messages exemplify an important cultural trend of contemporary
activism: their outspoken majoritarianism.
While the anti-globalisation movement and before it the new social movements of
feminism and ecologism tended to cast themselves as minorities, the wave of
so-called ‘Occupy’ or ‘take the square’ movements have made a crucial point in
their communications of wanting to be the majority of the people, as most
evidently manifested in Occupiers’ claim to being the 99%.

Drawing examples
from communications on the web and through social media in particular, I argue
that activist use of corporate social networking sites like Facebook and
Twitter in contemporary protest movements revolves to a great extent around
projecting their majoritarian ambitions.

For
contemporary movements social media have become the means through which to
appeal to ‘people’ as the majority of the population and to ‘generic’ internet
users as a whole as an approximation or a sample of this phantom majority. As
the most visible manifestation of a ‘mass web’, social networking sites have been
turned into recruitment booths to conquer new supporters well beyond the tiny
activist community and all its ramifications.

After summarizing
the argument of my recent book,Tweets and the Streets(2012), I want to
look briefly at the implications of this cultural trend, and the opportunities
and threats that it raises for contemporary activists.

Becoming “more”

To appreciate
the importance of the majoritarianism of contemporary Occupy movements we need
to take a step back, and look at the anti-globalisation movement, that between
the 1990s and 2000s came to constitute the main touchstone for social movement
theorists, and for many new media theorists alike.

It is fair to
say that all in all, the anti-globalisation movement was characterised by a minoritarian
and countercultural orientation. The movement saw itself as fundamentally a
coalition of minorities. These minorities would from time to time converge
(that was the activist jargon) towards the same places on the occasion of
counter-summit protests (anti-G8, anti-WTO, etc.). But apart from their
amassing on these rare occasions they were well aware that while “being
everywhere”, they were highly dispersed in space; that at any specific point in
time and space they would be a minority.

Such a
minoritarian orientation - that resonates with Gilles Deleuze's famous
expression of “minor politics” - is perfectly encapsulated in a famous quote by
Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, possibly the anti-globalisation
movement’s most representative figure and - dare I say? – ideologue:

“Marcos is gay in San Francisco,
Black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an
anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of
San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist
in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang
member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a
Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised,
oppressed minorities resisting and saying 'Enough'.”

Reading this
quote, it becomes evident what a sea change we have been witnessing in
contemporary protest culture. Nowadays, the “exploited, marginalised,
oppressed” is not framed in movement discourse as a minority, but rather as the
majority of the people, as the 99%.

Undoubtedly,
the minoritarian attitude of the anti-globalisation movement needs to be
understood in the context of a time of apogee for neoliberalism, in which
somehow progressive social movements had a very narrow space for manoeuver.
Nowadays, at a time at which the majority of the people in western countries
seem to be largely convinced as never before that the political and economic
system is not working, such minoritarian claims appear completely out of tune
with public perceptions. It is not surprising that the movements are framing
their actions differently, that they present themselves not as the defenders of
a minority, but as the expression of a majority.

Such a majoritarian
orientation pervades the entire web communication of contemporary protest
movements, and in particular their social media messages. An example of this
trend is a chess-themed Youtube video produced by Democracia Real Yaused in
preparation for the May 15 indignados
protest. On the chessboard a standard set of black pieces is progressively
overwhelmed by a mass of white pawns, representatives of the masses hitherto oppressed
by the elite. The video was accompanied by a set of flashing captions, listing
a number of grievances DRY campaigned on, including corruption and
unemployment, and ending with the following proclamations: “because we are more
humane, because we are more decent, because we are more respectable, because
we are more”.

Notice here how
the repetition of the adverb suggests a state of being quantitatively superior
to the elite, the deeply despised 1%, against which groups like the indignados and Occupy have constantly directed their rhetoric. This condition of
quantitative superiority bestows legitimacy on the “people” and the movement
representing it.

Much of contemporary
movements communication revolves precisely around invoking their “being more”,
their being a majority of the people, their being quantitatively superior to
their opponents: the super-rich. And popular social media like Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and many others, are used as a means to enact this invocation,
by appealing to the “generic internet user” as a random sample of the 99%.

Occupying the
digital mainstream

The way social
movements communicate is always a reflection of their self-definition, of the
values they hold, and of their vision of the world. In the case of the
anti-globalisation movement, its ideological minoritarianism went hand in hand
with the development of and reliance upon “autonomous” communicative
infrastructures. The communicative circuits of the anti-globalisation movement
were alternative and activist-oriented platforms, such as Indymedia, constituting in a sort of information clearing-house
for the movement, and dedicated activist listservs, such as those hosted by
aktivix and riseup.

These services
reflected a striving to supersede the corporate dominance of communication,
while at the same time creating and maintaining autonomous, self-organised
platforms of communication, as proposed by the famous slogan of Indymedia,
“don’t hate the media, become the media”. In the same way in which the movement
relied for its existence on the presence of the “autonomous spaces” in the form
of squats, social centres, protest camps, it also required its “autonomous
media” to organise itself. This was how the reasoning went in those times.

It is fair to
say that for the current generation of activists, such a deep belief in the
need to resort to autonomous communicative infrastructures appears questionable
at the very least. From the indignados
to Occupy, and before them in the movements of the Arab Spring, activists have cheerfully
and widely resorted to corporate social networking platforms such as Facebook
and Twitter, without much sign of remorse.

Activist use of
corporate media has spurred quite a bit of controversy among older scholars and
activists who have rightly denounced the forms of exploitation and capital
accumulation that are connected with these services. Yet, what this criticism
seems to miss is that contemporary activists use of social networking site
stems from a profoundly different vision of what their social movement is
about, vis-à-vis the anti-globalisation wave.

Occupy
activists use Twitter and Facebook, not because they ‘like’ them, but because
they see them as the only available means that might allow for mass
mobilisation.

Activists use
these social networking sites first and foremost out of instrumental
considerations: because they know that it is on these media that they can find
people who are not already within activist circles. Alternative sites, or
alternative social networking sites, such as Diaspora, or N-1, just won’t do, insofar as they remain alternative,
that is minority, phenomena.

Social
networking sites and Facebook in particular have come to constitute recruitment
booths for contemporary social movements. They are means of “conversion”
through which social movement organisers - the leaders who continue to exist in
a situation of supposed “leaderlessness” – pull into the movement a largely
unpoliticised and individualised constituency of (mostly) middle class (mostly)
youth. And such attitudes make a second fundamental point: that they actually
want to get more people inside the movement, that they see the necessity of
turning the movement they are part of into a mass movement.

This is
basically why activists nowadays are turning to social networking sites,
however much they might dislike their corporate character. These websites, as
the most visible manifestation of the massification of the Internet are
precisely the places you want to go to if you want to mobilise masses of
people, thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, rather than a few
hundreds.

Beyond activist self-ghettoisation

For some
people, this trend of occupation of the digital mainstream is to be
unreservedly condemned. By using Facebook, Twitter and similar commercial
services they think, activists will just be coopted by the corporate system.
They will be sucked into the mainstream culture and soon nothing will be left
of their antagonism, disappearing under an avalanche of like, like, like. This
is (unfortunately) the sort of standard reply you get in some Left circles.
Counter to this, I am personally convinced that the activist use of corporate
social media, in all its burning contradictions and risks, points to a
propitious shift in activist culture and a turning away from the self-ghettoising
tendencies that marginalised the anti-globalisation movement

Making use of
or “occupying” social media confronts activists with the experience and
feelings of people who are not part of the activist community, a community that
often falls prey to parochialism and self-referentiality. Dealing with these
mass new media forces them to adapt their language and imagery to audiences who
do not necessarily agree with their worldview.

Definitely
maintaining alternative channels of communication online and elsewhere is and
continues to be fundamental to constructing alternative and antagonistic
subjectivities. But it is not what (by itself) can spark a mass movement, a
movement that can make its mark felt on the structure of the political system.
For that you need to intercept the “masses”, masses who will never be found in
the neighbourhood of Indymedia, or activist listservs, and who therefore need
to be proactively sought out in crowded places, physical or virtual.

Once upon a
time, activists would mostly attempt this by leafleting or giving stirring
speeches in public squares, parks, or in front of schools and cinemas. Today
they are increasingly doing it by posting status messages on social networking
sites, the “sites” where dispersed masses of people gather virtually.

It is precisely
this political work of intercepting generic audiences what allows contemporary
social movements to be mass movements, movements capable of stoking fear among
the power elites, movements that at least stand a chance of enacting a major
structural change in our societies.

Therefore let’s
abandon some of the snobbish cynicism that has so far accompanied our analysis
of the culture of these movements and their use of social media. Let’s not fear
to be followed. Let’s not fear to be liked. Let’s not fear to be “more”.

About the author

Paolo Gerbaudo is a cultural and political sociologist and a lecturer in digital culture and society at King's College London. He is the author of Tweets and the Streets, a book about social media and activism published by Pluto press in October, 2012 and of the forthcoming The Mask and the Flag.

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